Description
Poetry. The truth and beauty welcomed in DOG GIRL is that nothing lasts, nothing is complete, and nothing is perfect. Staples continues the Joycean, Steinian and even Shakespearean wordplay evident in her first book, channeling it through a dizzying collection of formal structures—"Janimerick" through "Decemblank," with haiku, sonnets, prose poems, nursery rhyme, and more. She draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate and tumultuous marriage, her profound engagement with the nonhuman world, and a core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss.
"In DOG GIRL, Heidi Lynn Staples dances on a tightrope strung between sense and nonsense, between adulthood and childhood, and the lyricism of her verbal acrobatics confounds and delights in the way only genuine poetry can. Staples takes the existing lexicon and wrenches words into position, then commands them to be other than what they were, much to the joy of her astonished reader."—Christopher Kennedy
Author Bio
Heidi Lynn Staples's debut collection, GUESS CAN GALLOP, won the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize. She is also the author of DOG GIRL (Ahsahta Press, 2007), NOISE EVENT (Ahsahta Press, 2013), drawn from the ecology of her native Gulf Coast, and A**A*A*A (Ahsahta Press, 2018). She has also published a nonfiction work, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake (Caketrain, 2012). American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She serves as English-language editor of the global poetry initiative Duniyaadaari, and with the poet Amy King, edited Poets for Living Waters, an international response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with continued sites of action; and BIG ENERGY POETS: WHEN ECOPOETRY THINKS CLIMATE CHANGE (BlazeVOX, 2018). She lives with her partner and daughter in the Appalachian Highlands on Ruffner Mountain, neighbors with the imperiled tricolored bat.
Author City: ATHENS, GA USA